About Me

Saturday, September 05, 2009

Lost bloggers, Yinka Shonibare and a not-by-chance offering

I suppose I only have myself to blame, but coming back to blogville after a long time away, it seems so many of my favourite bloggers, have like me, fallen silent, many of them leaving the same kind of cryptic messages that I left when I disappeared. Glad to see that Jeremy's Naijablog is still going strong , as are Talatu Carmen's Abubuwan da nake tunani, Ore's Notes and Kpakpando. Solomonsydelle and Ms Catwalq remain faithful, but visiting the blogs of many of my fellow contributors to the 14th and Serenity project is a sad and desoalte experience, the last posts, weeks or even months old, spawning a strange and inexplicable sadness. Singto seems to have disappeared on a love-fuelled quest and while Chxta and Toksie continue to blog after relocating home to Nigeria, the hilarious Atutupoyoyo , Adaure and art activist Molara Wood seem to have been swallowd up in the feverish hecticness that is Lagos

Ah well, I suppose it is the way of the virtual world, here today and gone tomorrow...

The plan was to visit the High Line, New York's latest outdoor space, widely touted as the best thing since sliced bread, and so at a loose end on an afternoon, I headed for what I thought would be the entrance, clutching the review from the Financial Times which had what I thought was a useful map. In the event I found myself on the banks of the Hudson, dodging traffic, feet aching and with no way of entry to the nouveau nirvana.....Apparently it's a one-way entrance. Beaten I wandered under the bridge trying to make my way back to the nearest subway station, when a poster for Yinka Shonibare MBE's exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum caught my eye. I made a detour and emerging into the sunshine of Brooklyn spent a delightful couple of hours admiring his exquisite reinterpretations of Western art classics in his signature Dutch wax prints..

Adaobi Nwaubani does not come to us by chance. She has pulled off a stunning feat in her debut novel I Do Not Come to You By Chance, taking the phenomenon of the 419 trade and exposing the flipside in a witty, unnervingly accurate depiction of the milieu that shapes and drives those emails that waft into our inboxes on a regular basis. There are many laugh out loud moments and I urge you to go now and grab a copy of this first offering from the first Nigerian based author to emerge on the international literary scene in a long time....There has been such a harvest of African writing this year, and I imagine it is time I revised my Nigerian/African reading list

It's literally the end of summer and as the weather turns, the leaves begin to flutter down, driven by strong gusts of wind that seemingly appear from nowhere. It's that strange time when it's too early to carry a coat or a jumper and yet, wearing my light cotton shirts, on occasion, I find a gust of ice creeping between the cloth and my skin raising gooseflesh...